Tuesday, September 4, 2012

We are proud to release Wicked Good XPath, a Google-authored pure JavaScript implementation of the DOM Level 3 XPath specification. We believe it to be the fastest XPath implementation available in JavaScript.

To use Wicked Good XPath, simply download the wgxpath.install.js file and include it on your webpage with a script tag. For example:

Then call wgxpath.install() from your JavaScript code, which will ensure document.evaluate, the XPath evaluation function, is defined on the window object. To install the library on a different window, pass that window as an argument to the install function.

Despite the growing popularity of CSS selectors, XPath remains a useful mechanism to locate elements in an HTML document. It has particularly heavy usage in the context of frontend web testing tools like Selenium and Web Puppeteer. Sometimes there is simply no way to reference an element on the page other than with an XPath expression.

For those who have never used XPath, here is a taste:

On a Google search results page, the XPath expression //li[@class=”g”][3] identifies the third search result. Here is a snapshot from the Chrome extension XPath Viewer showing the third result selected when that expression is used.

A key challenge when using XPath, however, is that it is not natively supported on every browser. Most notably, Internet Explorer does not provide native XPath support for HTML documents. As a result, users turned towards pure JavaScript implementations of XPath. In 2005, Google engineers released AJAXSLT, which included a correct, but slow, XPath evaluator. Running web tests on IE using AJAXSLT was time-consuming.

Fast-forward to 2007, Cybozu Labs released JavaScript-XPath, a new JavaScript XPath implementation that was 10 times faster than AJAXSLT. The web testing tools began using it instead, and life was good... for a while. The JavaScript-XPath quickly fell out of maintenance, and bugs became tough to get fixed. Also, since it wasn't written in Google Closure, it was tricky for us Googlers to integrate into our JavaScript applications. A rewrite was necessary.

However, we went beyond merely porting the library to Google Closure and fixing a couple bugs. We identified some significant additional performance improvements, such that our version runs about 30% faster than the original. On top of that, the Closure compiler was able to minify our code down to a mere 25K, 40% smaller than JavaScript-XPath's 42K. Finally, the code is structured and documented in a way that we believe will make future maintenance quicker and easier.

We would like to thank our two Google interns, Michael Zhou and Evan Thomas, for doing the bulk of the development on this project.